The “Disputed” Reconstruction

It will take a while to parse Muir Russell. They’ve been working on it for 7 months and I’ve had it for a day. I’m going to place up notes on things as I notice them. At some point, I’ll try to pull together a longer response, but there are lots of interesting things as I read. Here’s an interesting point that touches on some larger issues.

In Fred Pearce’s recent book, he says that Jones told him that Yamal was used in only 3 of 12 AR4 reconstructions – a point which led him (incorrectly) to presume that statements made in McKitrick’s National Post article were “poppycock”:

According to Jones, of the 12 reconstructions used in the last IPCC reconstruction, authored by Briffa and published in 2007, only three contained Yamal data. (Pearce, 101)

The minutes of the April 9, 2009 meeting between the Team and Briffa-Jones say that 4 reconstructions used Yamal (a point re-confirmed in the CRU Response to the Apr 9 minutes)

Prof Briffa responded that the Briffa-Yamal series is only used in 4 of 10 reconstructions in the 4th IPCC reports and none in the 3rd. Salient, s6

In the Muir Russell Report, they say (section 7) that Yamal is used in only 4[2] out of 12 reconstructions in AR4, with footnote 2 saying that a “fifth reconstruction is disputed“. No provenance is given as to how this dispute arises, nor are there any documents at the CCE Review website showing evidence to the panel that Yamal was used in fifth “disputed” reconstruction.

The point at issue here is obviously medieval-modern comparisons. Only 8 of the 12 AR4 reconstructions provide such a comparison (Oerlemanns’ glacier recession; Pollack and Smerdon’s borehole; Rutherford et al 2005 and Briffa et al 2001 go back only to 1500 or 1400.) Using a denominator of 12 rather than 8 for the comparison is what climate scientists call a “trick”.

I visited this topic in October 2009 in two posts during the pre-Climategate Yamal controversy ( Sept 29 here and Oct 28 here, responding to Briffa’s post on the topic here.

The fifth “disputed” use pertains to Hegerl et al 2007. In Briffa’s table here, he says that Yamal was not used in this reconstruction. In my table here responding to Briffa, I observed that Hegerl et al 2007 stated that their “west Siberia long composite involved Yamal and the west Urals composite,” which I took as evidence that they used Yamal, which Briffa interprets otherwise – hence the “dispute”.

Now Jones’ number of three uses presumably arises from the fact that D’Arrigo et al said that they used Polar Urals, but actually used Yamal – a point observed at CA. I suggested to D’Arrigo co-author Rob Wilson that they submit an erratum on this point, but Wilson thought that it was a good idea not to do so. Briffa’s post noted that D;Arrigo’s “Yamal was used, though possibly labelled as Polar Urals” – a statement that I criticized at the time, since there was no actual doubt as to the label in the article – all you had to do was look.

Now what of the mysterious Hegerl reconstruction? Where the use or non-use is a mystery that remained unresolved even after the GBP200,000 inquiry. A question that IPCC Lead Author Briffa is unable to answer. In Sep 2005 as an IPCC reviewer, I asked IPCC to determine which proxies were used in Hegerl et al 2007. When they refused, I asked Hegerl directly (and also D’Arrigo et al). IPCC WG1 Chairman Susan Solomon threatened me with expulsion as an IPCC reviewer if I asked any more authors of unpublished papers for such information. So I wasn’t able to find out at the time.

Climategate correspondence at the time of the NAS panel hearings (March 2006) contains correspondence about a worried Hegerl, afraid of data requests from McKitrick and I and wondering whether it mightn’t be better to remove her reconstruction from the spaghetti graph.

I engaged in lengthy correspondence with Hegerl co-author and husband, Tom Crowley, trying to get information on their proxies and, in particular, their west Siberia composite. That drifted into a huge number of emails without any success. Crowley made fun of this in an interview with Andy Revkin last September.

Hegerl and Crowley were hired by Muir Russell panelist Geoffrey Boulton to the University of Edinburgh. In the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Copenhagen brief in December 2009, Boulton used the mysterious Hegerl reconstruction.

Only in Team climate science would there be a “dispute” over whether Yamal was used in the Hegerl reconstruction. Be that as it may, you’d have thought that Boulton would have been perfectly placed to get to the bottom of the mystery of whether Yamal was used in the Hegerl reconstruction. Unfortunately, the moment seems to have passed. And thus the dispute lingers on.

The actual issue is the impact of Yamal on the AR4 spaghetti graph. Muir Russell purports to rebut a straw man that Yamal didn’t affect all the reconstructions – a point that I’ll return to. This is a strawman. The original point was that bristlecones and/or Yamal had a material impact on virtually all of the 1000-year reconstructions (seven of eight) – not that Yamal simpliciter affected all the reconstructions. The purported rebuttals completely miss the point. Yamal was Scotty Pippen to the bristlecones’ Michael Jordan. If I said that Jordan and Pippen scored most of the points for the Chicago Bulls. The strawman is to restate that I’d claimed that Pippen scored most of the points, and then purporting to rebut it by showing Michael Jordan highlights. Jordan and Pippen, not Pippen by himself.

Or as I’ve expressed elsewhere. Yamal was like crack cocaine to paleoclimatogists (but bristlecones were heroin.)

relevant comparison for Yamal is thus not 3 out of 12, but 5 out of 8 – something that is a material difference unless you’re a climate scientist.

59 Comments

… it seems like we have a little He Who Must Not Be Named here. Muir Russell is silent on who claimed 5 Yamal uses and there’s no submitted evidence on the point. Can we therefore presume that they read the relevant CA post … but Gavinesquely didn’t cite it?

I first came across the term infotainment in the 90s. But CA does both the best.

They dance around each issue with delicate aplomb,
Avoiding simple questions as if to dodge a bomb,
As they Gavinesquely block and utterly dismiss
Questions asked that dare to question how much data is amiss,
I notice that their whitewash covers less and less each day,
And they fail to ask the questions that the skeptics keep in play,
Questions clear and bright and shining asking if the data for their graph
Was from Yamal or not – it’s not quantum-level math!

(thanks for “Gavinesquely” – his hubris deserves an adverb like that one)

No, Oerleman is not a Mann, but it is interesting that the AR4 only shows Oerleman’s reconstruction until 1700 (Figure 4.13). Other studies that go back in time to the Roman epoch show a much more diverse picture:

I must say that while the vast majority of the points that SM makes are on target and of value, I cannot see what the point of “is it 3,4, or 5 reconstructions” has to do with anything concerning AGW or CRU email-gate.

I don’t believe it pertinent to furthering the discussion about whether or not the planet is warming up as result of the activity of man, nor the methods (scientific or not) used to answer that question.

Isn’t it sufficient to say the Yamal data is good or bad? Unless I’ve missed an important part of the email scandal that hinges on how many times Yamal was used, I think it’s a trivial point and sounds snarky.

Isn’t it sufficient to say the Yamal data is good or bad? Unless I’ve missed an important part of the email scandal that hinges on how many times Yamal was used, I think it’s a trivial point and sounds snarky.

it has little to do with snark.

One of the defense points for the Mann hockey stick has been that regardless of the errors in its construction, their result is consistent with countless other independent paleo reconstructions done by other climate scientists. A good deal of the “independence” is based on the contention that proxies other than those from the Mann set were used in those corroborative studies.

Since the Yamal data are particularly prone to forming the blade of a hockey stick, it was very important that this particular proxy not be one of those involved – hence the denial that the number of uses was minimal. Steve merely points out that this denial is in fact false.

Yes, but that noise (the teeth of the “sawblade”) tends to cancel when the series are averaged. Just look at the composite image in the thread that you cite. Averaging enhances the population signal by reducing the individual series noise.

Recall that these YAD outliers are not long series. They only go back to the 1800s. They don’t need to look stickish themselves to create a blade on a reconstruction that goes back 600-1000 years. Scale matters. And the blade is mostly about the 20th c.

The issue of 3, 4 or 5 reconstructions has to do with the impact of the Yamal data on the overall composite. The Yamal reconstruction has been shown to be vastly different(in favor of AGW) than Polar Urals. Thus if you include more Yamal sites than Polar Ural sites, you can skew the resulting data in favor of AGW.

The point is that these proxies have been used to reinforce the claim that recent warming is “unprecedented”. Most of the reconstructions discussed above contain one of two favoured proxies that questionably bias the results in favour of that argument.(Hence dispute over how often they’re used).
Lord Muir has intentionally ducked the issue and isn’t the slightest bit bothered who knows it.

If you don’t “see the point”, my advice is to wait a bit. And my guess is you soon will. This is not a newspaper. It’s a journal. Steve M has stated in advance that a full reply will require some patience. This is the first post of many to come.

Yes, I’m sure it will be. I have been an avid reader here for several years. My point was related more to the purpose of the report, which was to investigate the CRU email scandal, not to re-hash the validity of proxy data.

It seems there are a few points of departure (buttons) that get pushed and the point of the discussion gets lost in the trivia, much like a long-divorced couple who get be in the same room for more than 5 minutes without starting the same old argument; paying no mind to why they were in the room in first place.

It has a few things to go to. One, is that it is another example of how the Team attempts to minimize their problems on whatever specious grounds they can dredge up –which any prosecuting attorney would tell you is at least circumstantial evidence of knowledge of guilt. Even Russell admits that in a different context, re Briffa insisting multiple times on “confidentiality”.

Secondly, it is darned odd that Russell, who in several other instances did not hesitate to contact third parties to clarify a point in dispute, does not report doing so here. Did he not do so? If not, why not? Or were the authors of the 5th study, who resisted Steve’s efforts to settle the matter, unwilling to help Russell resolve this question as well when contacted? If so, why? It seems a pretty straightforward question to ask/answer about published work.

Perhaps you’re too close to it. In my highly regulated world there would be definitive, verifiable answers to these questions or you’d be out of business.

The fact that Muir Russell’s only taking to task involves transparency, openness, treatment of data etc. demonstrates the pertinence of this post. It’s bad enough that the science was sloppy but when the criticism is made and goes undocumented it only gets worse.

Corporations, public and private, are audited once or more a year by independent third party accountants; Steve continues to demonstrate why this standard needs to be applied to climate science. So wake up and smell the coffee! ;-)

Steve,
I’m not sure how common the practice is now, but many years ago, during the discovery phase of several trade secret lawsuits I was indirectly involved in, the lawyers for the defense always had experts on hand during depositions to make sure they asked the right questions and received sensible answers. I assume this was because the lawyers did not consider themselves experts on the technical details involved in the suits.

It is a pity the members of the three panels investigating the CRU and Climategate weren’t similarly self aware. I would have to classify them as (at least by my definition) incompetent, since they fail to admit their own ignorance of the details of the matters under investigation. It would have been quite simple for them to have had you, or others with similar knowledge, on hand during the questioning. And, I am sure the results would have been quite different.

Good point; one [the only?] of the complaints against Wegman was that he was not an expert in dendrology; but since the issue was statistical anaylysis, where he had his expertise, the complaint was not germane; here the need for expertise in dendrology would seem to be more exigent.

Steve, correct me if I’m wrong,deals with numbers. To him the importance of getting both numerator and denominator as accurate as possible before making a calculation is paramount. If the number on the top varies between 3 and 5 while the bit on the bottom ranges from 8 to 12 then anyone who deals day to day with probabilties that range from 0 to 1 and doesn’t get agitated with claims that ‘disputed’ scenarios that pit 0.25 against 0.625 don’t really matter, then they have been badly advised by their career teacher!
Dealing with Post Normal Science may induce headaches for many but compared to the blinding migraines of Post Normal Numerology ’tis merely a fleshwound!

I just got a call from Gabi, who spent the dayin Washington at that NAS panel on the
stick. She doesn't have access to e-mail today, and so asked me to convey a message.

McIntyre and McKittrick were there, and seem to have left Gabi with the strong impression
that they will be insisting on having access to supporting data, etc., used to build
reconstructions. Gabi says that this is making her nervous, wants to make sure that
you are aware of the status of her reconstruction, and wants to be sure that you
are comfortable with continuing to use it in Ch 6. She says that if you feel it necessary
to exclude her reconstruction from your SOD of Ch 6, you should do so.

Overpeck replied (cc Briffa) saying that IPCC didn’t have to provide the data – which he seems to consider the “accepted way”:

I don’t think the IPCC has to provide anything beyond the report – in fact, I’m almost sure Susan made this point to me/a bigger group already. I’ll cc this to her, just so she know’s what might be coming, but I think we’re fine. M&M can get Congress to ask the FBI to secret Gabi away forever for doing her science the accepted way. Seriously, it’s up to her to make things available as appropriate

Briffa replied:

Let us stay with Gabi as it is in Figure etc. and as you say in the Nature paper anyway. We may have more problem with Tett et al. – need to check status , and Wilson et al is not as it turns out accepted yet – awaiting corrections.

Just imagine – we might have found out whether Hegerl used Yamal. That wouldn’t be doing science the “accepted way”.

In Sep 2005 as an IPCC reviewer, I asked IPCC to determine which proxies were used in Hegerl et al 2007. When they refused, I asked Hegerl directly (and also D’Arrigo et al). IPCC WG1 Chairman Susan Solomon threatened me with expulsion as an IPCC reviewer if I asked any more authors of unpublished papers for such information. So I wasn’t able to find out at the time.

Isn’t this sort of behavior the very same exhibited by Briffa when talking to Wahl regarding IPCC material? (consorting unpublished papers) I know that many folks out there are claiming that you can’t point to any specific IPCC rule that Briffa broke by doing this, but it seems like you were threatened with expulsion for doing something similar.

It’s simply appalling that not only Briffa but the whole world doesn’t know what proxies are used in reconstructions published (I presume) in peer reviewed journals. Climate scientists, like slight-of-hand magicians, hate to reveal their secrets. The “tricks” don’t work as well when everyone knows how they did it.

Our 16 year old grand daughter is away from Oz, doing a year at school in USA. She went for a driving test and failed one question. Using the modern style of communication, she noted by email –

“and i only failed becuz i missed one too many questions
and i got all the giveway q right. It was like can’t i take the all right ones and replace them with a wrong one so i pass
the lady said I’m sorry no :( “

Members of the Russell Inquiry, you have displayed a comparable skill set.

If it is humiliating to be likened to a 16 year old, then the sorry reality is that you caused it.

This can also serve as an answer for those who query why 3, 4 or 5 out of 8-12 matters. It matters because you fail. For all the world to see.

If 3, 4, or 5 really doesn’t matter, then why won’t the Team say the accurate number? It would help their credibility if they spoke the truth, yet they refuse to do it. The number obviously matters to them. They evidently feel they have to downplay the fact that these various reconstructions are not all that independent.

My guess is there is some dispute over the definition of “ivolvement”, as in when we say that Yamal is “involved” in a given reconstruction. Exactly how it is “involved” matters because degree of involvement colors its relative weight. Until that dispute is settled you won’t know which number is most appropriate.

bender,
I have to disagree. Relative weight is not the issue, but whether it was used at all. If it was used even with a small relative weight, then it was involved. Once it is determined it is involved, then you can look at issues of relative weight.

“Involvement” can be thought of as “cut and dried”, although I don’t know what purpose that would serve. If your purpose is to understand the source of the variance in these numbers, then I submit that it matters how Briffa defines “involvement”. Negligible involvement means its involvement is close to zero, even if it is non-zero. “Involvement” is therefore not “cut and dried”. It is your mental filter that is doing the cutting and drying.

Dig in you heels if you like. I don’t know why you would choose to do so.

I understand and agree with what Bender says about involvement not being cut-and-dried.

But isn’t the real important issue here the degree of statistical significance of, say, the last 50 years of Yamal data? That’s the issue I keep coming back to in my mind. Exactly how (if at all) can significance be demonstrated for those particular data; and if there is a way, who (if anyone) has managed to do so?

It seems to me that all the other issues people keep raising with Yamal (including what a reasonable weighting is for the overall series, and what the effect is of including The One Tree) are relatively peripheral by comparison.

So it’s not going to be all that hard to respond, because Steve has already responded, long before climategate.

Steve: I replied to some points but Climategate sort of interrupted the conversation. It’s very frustrating that Boulton didn’t bother considering the online replies to Briffa’s claims in his “inquiry”.

Note how many times questionable practices are defended as “expert opinion”. Why does the inquiry stop there? It is precisely the authority of this “expertise” that is supposed to be in question. This is not supposed to be a Q%A with the “experts”. It’s supposed to be a cross-examinational dialogue.

in his opinion the CRU Yamal TRW series provides a far better representation of the region than either the Polar Urals published by CRU in 1995 or the chronology referred to as the “updated Polar Urals”

bender,
I don’t want a food fight here, but I don’t understand why you think you can read Briffa’s mind or why you would speculate he had weighting in mind. There is nothing in the context to indicate weighting was at issue. If the topic was whether or not the inclusion on Yamal “mattered” in these reconstructions, then weighting would be in view. But the issue is involvement and the answer is either yes or no.

So why did Briffa come up with a different number? He made a mistake. It happens. It is not the end of Briffa’s career, it does not damage his career at all. It is simply a mistake.

BTW, the use of the term “dispute” is ill chosen. It should rightly be called a disagreement. 1st person says “a” and 2nd person says “b,” that’s a disagreement. The two people involved might not even know they are disagreeing with each other. When the 1st person comes back and says “No, your wrong it’s a and here’s why…” and then 2nd person replies “No, b and here’s why…”, then you have a dispute.

“Prof Briffa clarified that CRU had used this chronology in only three publications”

That’s probably where Jones’s “3” comes from. CRU used it three times. Others used it once or twice, the second usage (fifth overall) being disputed.

Steve: I don’t think so. I think it’s more likely that Jones thought that D’Arrigo used Polar Urals (which is what they said they used) and not Yamal. Rob Wilson could and should have issued an erratum long ago but they were too stubborn to do so.

Professor Briffa said that the number of core counts was made public in the publication of Hantemirov and Shiyatov in 2002.

p.5

Yes, we already know of Briffa’s assertion. And it has already been explained why this claim is highly misleading. *Some* core counts were revealed in that 2002 paper. But that they were tied to the series in question was not known until 2009. Dodge and hope it washes. Peas and thimbles.
Steve: Hantemirov did not state that this was the same data set as Briffa 2000. Rob Wilson definitely thought that there were more modern cores than reported in Hantemirov. Speaking of which, Briffa said that no one other than me ever asked for the data. We had a discussion with Wilson about that – maybe someone can locate the link for me.

I wonder if they asked Obsborn why he considered melvin a “loose cannon” and thus incapable of answering Mcintyre directly on the web.
( just go to the mails and search on “loose cannon” around sept 29/09
there abouts if memory serves me

this question may have been answered long ago but here goes. I cannot read climate audit anymore since there was changeover to the “new format or host”. I’m not sure what changed in the last several months but even when I have a full screen displayed the text overlaps on itself making the blog posting unreadable. The comments are fine and are 100% readable.
Just wondering if there is some type of setting I have to modify to be able to read climate audit again.
thank
Ed